Herb Brooks(1937–2003)

Herbert Paul Brooks Junior was born at Saint Paul, Minnesota, on the fifth of August 1937, eldest son of Herbert Paul Brooks Senior, a Saint Paul insurance underwriter, and Pauline Skarman. He was raised on the East Side of Saint Paul in the long Minnesota ice-hockey tradition (the Brooks family had been amateur hockey players for two generations), was schooled at Johnson High School in Saint Paul, where he captained the 1955 Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament championship-winning team, and took the place at the University of Minnesota in 1955 on the strength of the hockey scholarship.

He played four seasons at the University of Minnesota under the head coach John Mariucci 1955 to 1959, took the United States Olympic team to the 1964 Winter Olympics at Innsbruck and the 1968 Winter Olympics at Grenoble as a player (the only American to play on two Olympic ice-hockey teams without medalling), and was the final player cut from the 1960 United States Olympic team that took the gold medal at Squaw Valley (he often said in his later interviews that the 1960 cut was the single formative event of his coaching life). He played briefly in the senior amateur leagues, retired from playing at twenty-eight, and took up coaching.

He took the head-coaching job at the University of Minnesota in 1972 in his thirty-fifth year and across seven seasons rebuilt the Minnesota Golden Gophers into the dominant force of the National Collegiate Athletic Association hockey: he won the NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey Championship in 1974, 1976 and 1979, the only coach in NCAA history to win three national championships in six seasons. He was appointed head coach of the United States Olympic team in 1979 for the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, took a roster of twenty college amateurs (the oldest twenty-five years old; not one with NHL experience), conducted them through a six-month national-team training programme on his own punishing physical-and-tactical system, and entered the Olympic tournament in February 1980 as a heavy underdog to the Soviet, Czechoslovak, Swedish and Finnish teams.

The United States team came through the round-robin without a loss and met the Soviet Union team in the medal-round on the evening of the twenty-second of February 1980 at the Olympic Field House at Lake Placid in front of an arena crowd of eight thousand five hundred. The Soviet Union were the four-time defending Olympic gold-medalists, had beaten the same United States team 10 to 3 in a pre-Olympic exhibition fortnight earlier, and were rated by every contemporary observer as the strongest single ice-hockey team in the world. The United States team won 4 to 3 on goals by Buzz Schneider, Mark Johnson, Mark Johnson again, and the eventual winning goal from Mike Eruzione at ten minutes of the third period. The closing seconds of the game, with the United States team holding the lead and Al Michaels's call on ABC ('Do you believe in miracles? Yes!'), are at the centre of the iconography of modern American sport. The United States team beat Finland 4 to 2 two days later to take the Olympic gold medal.

He coached afterwards at the professional level: the New York Rangers (1981 to 1985, took the Rangers to the Eastern Conference Finals 1981), the Minnesota North Stars (1987 to 1988), the New Jersey Devils (1992 to 1993), the Pittsburgh Penguins (1999 to 2000), and the 2002 United States Olympic team that took the silver medal at Salt Lake City. He died at a single-car accident on Interstate 35 outside Forest Lake, Minnesota, on the eleventh of August 2003 in his sixty-sixth year. He was elected to the United States Hockey Hall of Fame in 1990 and to the International Ice Hockey Federation Hall of Fame in 1999. The Disney film Miracle (2004, with Kurt Russell as Brooks) put the 1980 team into the front rank of American sports cinema. The Brooks name in modern American sport carries the weight of the Miracle on Ice of the twenty-second of February 1980.